I dared not to stride on the fresh snow. Some guilt within, preventing me not to spoil the angelic whiteness that seemed having washed away all sins of our land and holding promise for ending century’s old trepidation.
It seemed what people of literature call, as ‘magic realism’ at its pinnacle. Draped in snow every cottage had turned into Taj Mahal. Every stark naked poplar tree looked like lofty marble columns of some legendary palace touching heavens, with Roman and Greek gods and goddesses sitting on sills watching happenings down below with a macabre sense of humour. The Deevh-Kaw ( long billed crows) perching on gigantic white chinar trees looked like white phoenixes.
The celestial calm enshrouding everything in mystery turned a prosy person like me poetic and suddenly Aga Shahid Ali’s poem, the ‘Snowman’ started :
Of whale bones…
Generations of snowmen on my back
They tap every year on my window,
Their voices hushed to ice.
No, they won’t let me out of winter,
And I’ve promised myself,
Even if I’m the last snowman,
That I’ll ride into spring
On their melting shoulders.
The lines, “No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman that I’ll ride into spring’ incubated a new hope in me. The line ‘That I will ride into spring’ continuously echoed inside my soul till I saw two young boys making a snowman in a nearby compound.
They were very artistically chiseling out ears, nose and lips out of the snow head with a shoehorn and a small knife. They had fixed two long twigs and an old sheet of solar light on the head of the snowman. I enquired from the boys what where they making, both of them instantaneously replied, “It is a Snow Robot”… and what are these twigs and sheet for…The reply was they are putting him on a remote control…
The Snow Robot spoke a lot. It spoke about a “generation leap” and changing sensibilities. It spoke of a paradigm shift, from mythical world to scientific temperament. The snow robot made me remember that we also made snowmen, besides using shoehorn we used wooden or an iron “chalan” for chiselling out the mythical man out of huge mounds of snow.
In those days of art and love, some carpenters by artistically and intricately carving floral designs on these chalans tiny pokers made them into pieces of art. Tiny pokers from Islamabad most made of willow were cheaper than those that made from walnut wood by carpenters in the backyard of our home. This small poker was the best tool for chiseling our best shapes out of snow rolled into mounds that we called as ‘shenamaan’ . I had mastered at creating cats and dogs out of snow. Making cat out of snow was easier and quicker. I used the ‘K’ brand mileechat ink tablets that were harder than other ink tablets for making eyes of the cat . The ink from tablet did not spread and did not spoil the face of the cat as ink from the inkpot. Some of my friends had mastered art of creating gigantic snowman to the legendary image of the yeti that we believed descended in the city along with packs of jackals during heavy snowfalls from the Mahadev and Zabarwan hills. Sometimes , the snowman would be clad in straw. Some boys in the evening would light a kerosene lantern and hang it on the arm of snowman, to make him look like Braham-Braham-Chok, an imaginary supernatural that was believed to guide the wandering travelers out of the snow clad wilderness at night.
The kids of third generation making snow robots and naming them after the animated characters like rekunda took me on a voyage down the memory lane into winter days of my childhood. Talking about which would be as good as taking the children into country of Alif bay’ the sad country, that has nothing to offer but sadness. Notwithstanding sadness that was distinctly visible, in our land, children and adults welcomed winter by arranging ‘ bonfire nights’ and telling the world that one day sadness will go from this land.
Z.G.Muhammad is a noted writer and columnist
